Death Metal Underground

Production: Fuzzy and warm production which favors the intersection of bass and mids with an almost tape-derived organic buzz, but catches the instruments combined in a clear and enveloping room sound.

Review: To extend music beyond the extreme the artist as musician must distill it from the linear scale of construction/deconstruction and use the raw sound as an inspiration for the study of pattern, and the organization of patterns such that a cycle fuses the deconstructed with the creative genesis. As the latest evolution of a series of related acts, Profanatica Profanatitas de Domonatia unites its disparate forces in an unnervingly contemplative take on the death metal and black metal genres.

Sounding like a fusion of the first Incantation album and the early Norse-inspired works from Demoncy, and incorporating the legendarily organic drumming of Paul Ledney in a watchful underuse of technique to strengthen like a bone in muscle the mood of each progression, this album creates its songs in epic narrative format from New York death metal styled rushing chorded riffs interspersed with melodic development in lead-picked arias of phrase expanding on the ideas of the chorded elements and counterbalancing their intense rhythm, giving the songs a chance to settle back into themselves and then prismatic recombine and create an inner geometric dimension to what was established with linearity.

Much as metal finds beauty in darkness by using light and dark in a structuralist manner that emphasizes interconnectivity, Profanatica blends the fragmented with the whole in a staccato sequence which interrupts itself to resume previous thoughts joined with the present by the similarity of the motif shape they address; this style of "ring composition" is complicated by its tendency to cite from past Ledney-related projects, including first album Incantation, Havohej, Revenant and some riffs similar to those of fellow New Yorkers Immolation. Behind the drone, periodic clear tones and the intertwining smoke wisps of qlippothic voices merge.

The result, more a codex than the cycle running down of most rock-inspired music, forms cycles within cycles and in their commonality transitions between the two, creating a contemplative environment in which abstract meaning more than musical device must be tracked. Percussion often highlights guitar passages by opposition, preserving dynamic and detaching rhythm in the style of an ambient band while avoiding the expectation frenzy of popular music. Guitar melodies are breathtakingly beautiful when caught in full development but arise from ashes and dust of budget riff patterns, underneath rasping vocals designing to sound like rain caught by sudden fast winds. This album blatantly and cheerfully embraces beauty, and in its resurgent energy, suggests more a seizure of opportunities found beyond the linear logic of opposition and piety in our time than a worship of one or another parties. It is not war against Christ but a path beyond Christlike thinking enwrapped in the camouflage of blasphemy and perversion.